A collection of thoughts, quotes, questions, and struggles in the midst of faith, risk, and (im)possibility...

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

reading Simone Weil...

Here I am, trying to read another mystic... :-) I've wanted to read something by Simone Weil for a while now. She is one of those names you hear "Christian intellectual" types toss around, but few seem to know what to do with her or exactly how to react to her writings. I'm feeling sort of the same way as I work through Gravity and Grace. I am intrigued by her commitment to follow what she believed to be Christ's mandate for her life, in spite of the disturbing actions that commitment sometimes entailed (read a brief biography of her life and you'll know what I mean...). But as with most mystics, the language they use is sometimes very difficult to decipher. Still, I find myself intrigued by paragraphs like this one:

"We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say 'I'. That is what we have to give to God - in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given to us to accomplish - only the destruction of the 'I'... Nothing in the world can rob us of the power to say 'I'... except extreme affliction. Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the 'I' from outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves. What happens to those whose 'I' has been destroyed from outside by affliction? It is not possible to imagine anything for them but annihilation according to the atheistic or materialistic conception."

A lot to chew on there... trying to decide whether I agree or disagree, or even if I understand what she is saying. And here I am supposed to be taking a break from thinking while I'm on break from school... :-)